Dorsey’s arrest no surprise -- just a relief

I knew that they were going to get to the bottom of it, said Phyllis Brown, composed amid a surge of cameras, boom mics and reporters’ notebooks.

The wife of slain DeKalb County Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown had just emerged from a 15-minute hearing at which the man accused of ordering her husband’s murder, former Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, along with ex-Deputy Marvin Walker, were brought before a judge for a preliminary hearing.

Phyllis Brown’s faith notwithstanding, the surprise announcement in the wee hours last Friday that DeKalb officials had charged three men with Brown’s murder Dec. 15 of last year brought to a close a lengthy, frustrating, manpower-intensive investigation. Just four months ago, DeKalb District Attorney J. Tom Morgan declared the probe “dead in the water.”

Along with Dorsey and Walker, police arrested one-time deputy wannabe David Isaiah Ramsey, a Virgin Islands immigrant who is believed to have pulled the trigger of the Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol that cut down Brown in his own front yard. Ramsey did not appear at Friday’s hearing.

The breakthrough came with a plea deal reached earlier last week between Morgan’s office and Patrick Cuffy, a former county jailer involved in a wild March shootout that left one purported drug dealer dead and another wounded.

Cuffy long described himself as a suspect in the Brown slaying. He ended months of denials by pleading guilty to assault charges in the March shootings.

Dorsey, who lost a bitter runoff to Brown, had long been the target of suspicion in Brown’s murder, as had Cuffy. Walker, who was fired by Derwin Brown’s appointed replacement, Sheriff Thomas Brown, was among several deputies the slain sheriff-elect had planned to dismiss as part of his anti-corruption drive. Among the corruption allegations were charges that Dorsey had misused inmates to work on the homes of political supporters of his wife, Sherry Dorsey, an Atlanta city councilwoman who was trounced in her re-election bid last month.

The three defendants reportedly were kept at separate locations after their arrests. Sources tell CL Dorsey is likely to be housed at the Gwinnett County Jail pending disposition of his case.

Dorsey had nothing to say at Friday’s hearing, during which prosecutors sought and received a delay for the defendants’ probable cause hearing, which was scheduled for Dec. 18, one year and three days after Brown’s murder. Shotgun-wielding officers were prominently in place around the county’s Magistrate Court, just a few hundred feet from the sheriff’s department that Dorsey once commanded and from which he allegedly recruited at least some of Brown’s killers.??